Death
of Gerhart Riegner, World Jewish Congress official who sent
1942 Report from Switzerland that Hitler had Decided on
Final Solution.

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Miami, Florida, Wednesday, December 5, 2001

Gerhart Riegner, warned
of Holocaust

BY GLARE NULLIS

Associated Press

GENEVA
- (AP) - Gerhart Riegner, the man who tried in vain
to alert the world about the planned Nazi Holocaust and
later led the World Jewish Congress, has died. He was
90.

He was known for his now-famous cable
of Aug. 8, 1942, which detailed Hitler's plan to deport
an estimated four million Jews to Eastern Europe to
annihilate them. His warnings initially fell on deaf ears in
the United States and Britain.

For the rest of his life, Riegner was haunted by the
knowledge that many of the six million Jews killed in Nazi
concentration camps could have been saved if the United
States and Britain had acted promptly on his warning
dispatched from his "listening post" in Switzerland.

"Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment,
powerlessness and loneliness as when I sent messages of
disaster and horror to the free world, and no one believed
me," Riegner recalled in his memoirs.

Riegner went on to serve as secretary-general of the
World Jewish Congress from 1965 to 1983. The late French
President François Mitterand decorated Riegner
with the Legion of Honor in 1987.

He was closely involved with the often-difficult process
of improving relations with the Roman Catholic Church, and
was present at the signing of the basic accord normalizing
relations between the Holy See and Israel in 1993.

Riegner was also active at the United Nations, especially
in the campaign to rescind the 1975 General Assembly vote
that equated Zionism with racism. The resolution was finally
annulled in 1991.

RIEGNER was born into an intellectual Jewish family in
Germany. His first experience with anti-Semitism came when
another boy yelled "You dirty little Jew" at him while on
his way to school. "Filthy little Christian," he shouted
back -- a response that later caused him great shame.

Years later, in 1933, Nazi thugs stood outside his
parents' Berlin house yelling "Jews out! Jews out!" while
Riegner sat in the bath, frozen in terror. The family
subsequently fled to France and then moved on to
Switzerland.

Riegner, a trained lawyer, was appointed to staff the
office of the newly founded World Jewish Congress in Geneva.
He remained in Switzerland during the war.

On July 29, 1942, he received a
phone call from a friend at the Federation of Jewish
Communities in Switzerland with news that a German
industrialist -- apparently with a bad conscience -- had
told him of a plan being discussed by Hitler to
exterminate the Jews of Europe.

"We discussed it for five or six hours, walking along the
lake shore. Did we have to take it seriously? Was it
conceivable to kill millions of people? Was it credible?"
Riegner agonized. He decided it was.

On Aug. 8, 1942, Riegner asked the U.S. vice consul in
Geneva to inform the U.S. government of the plan and to
transmit the contents of the telegram to Stephen
Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress and a
personal friend of President Franklin Roosevelt.

"Received alarming report," Riegner cabled, "that in
Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under
consideration, according to which all Jews in countries
occupied or controlled by Germany, numbering 3 '/2 to four
million, should, after deportation and concentration in the
East, be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for
all the Jewish question in Europe."

Riegner's telegram was the first authoritative word that
the Nazis actually had a coordinated extermination plan.

However, it was not until January 1944 that Roosevelt
created the War Refugee Board to try to save Jews.

"Since my first telegram, 18 months had passed during
which time the inexorable massacre continued and millions of
Jews were sacrificed," Riegner wrote in his memoirs.